Is Recycling Worth It? | Hacker News Reader

Is Recycling Worth It?

sirwart.com

14 pointsendlessvoid9413 comments

This article doesn't address whether "recycling is worth it" or not, and instead basically states a truism: If you have X amount of stuff, and you divert Y amount of that stuff to other places, you will be left with Z amount of stuff which is less than what you started with.

Penn & Teller did a decent job of digging into this a while back on Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVBFIciqGU

Basically some things are worth recycling (aluminum), some things break even (plastic/glass), and others are a terrible idea to recycle (paper).

I would love to see a similar look into the composting movement that's going on now. My suspicion is that it's a terrible idea due to the methane emissions. In landfills the methane can be captured and used for generating power (Yes this still creates CO2, but that's not nearly as powerful a greenhouse gas as methane.)

I wonder if anything has changed in the more than ten years since Penn and Teller covered the economics of recycling for an entertainment show on Showtime?

ADDENDUM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7779102

>paper cups in the compost bin actually going to make progress towards zero waste given the mountains of trash that end up in the landfill today

As far as space I don't know, but I do know for aluminum cans there is a benefit in the amount of kilowatt*hours (Anyone else wonder why we just don't say Joules in the US?) saved. I believe the number is crazy too, like > 90% of the energy is saved by recycling the aluminum.

Most of the energy is spent reducing the bauxite, an ore of aluminum that is the world's main source of aluminum. Once that's done, you don't have to spend it again.

We say kilowatt-hours in Brazil too. Since it's a SI unit, I believe other countries use this too. It's probably because it's a more convenient unit to use when talking about electrical energy consumption, because 1 watt-hour is the energy consumed by something that has 1W of power running for one hour. One kWh is 3.6 megajoules, so it would be less convenient in this context.

Joules are mostly used as a scientific term. BTUs and kWh in turn are kind of like industry terms that came about with the steam power revolution and still define heat/energy production in most countries today.

Not at all what it says on the tin: it's illustrating that San Francisco is reducing waste (a benefit, to be certain), but says nothing whatsoever about the cost.

Bug report:

Graph does not work in Firefox.

Fix:

Change lines 93-94 to

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             this.parentNode.insertBefore(td, null);

Rationale:

`insertBefore` requires two parameters in the spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113/core...

Chrome and IE do not follow spec: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=964212

I lived in the same 3 unit building for 7 years in SF. Not once did I ever see the other tenants use the green compost bin except for once or twice a year when trimming the yard.

That to me suggests that getting the compost and recyclables out of landfill means removing people from having to do it.

I know apparently some cities do the separation at the garbage collection site. That seems like a much better idea. Rather than trying to get 800,000 people to behave correctly just try to get a few companies to do it correctly. Problem solved 100%

I saw this also as someone that worked at a big tech company that prides themselves on hiring only the smartest and then watching how those supposedly smartest could not correctly place things in the right bins. If even supposedly smart people can't do it why would we think anyone else can?

Just move the separation to one or two locations and the problem only has a few people (or robots) that need to be trained and only those same locations need to be checked that their doing it right.

It would be hard to argue that recycling is not worth it. Now in a way, one could say that recycling is just a brilliant way for goods manufacturers to offload environmental management costs on the consumer. I sometimes feel like I'm being manipulated as a useful idiot of capitalism.

The existence of products like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Open-Smart-Plastic-Package-Opener/dp/B...

.. just says it all

Given that paper waste is apparently compostable (or at least not harmful to the composting process), would it make more sense to change the system to the blue bin being "plastic, cloth, and metal", green being "food, paper, and lawn trimmings", and black being "glass and everything else"?

This might not be 100% optimal but it seems a whole lot more user friendly and I'm sure simplicity of the system increases compliance.

I was kind of hoping for an analysis of what happens to whatever goes into the compost and recycling bins, whether it's actually recycled and if so is it done at all efficiently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com